Once Upon a Dam Time

Photo Credit: Friends of the River

The American River has always been a tough place to build a dam. 

The little Gold Rush dams are long gone. But the mid-20th century featured a couple of big dam washouts. Most here will remember the 1986 failure of the 300-foot-tall Auburn dam coffer dam, so iconically filmed by its builder, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the resulting overfilling of Folsom Dam, which led to some harrowing releases into the American River through the state’s capital city — and reignited two decades of political efforts to build the Auburn dam astride the river’s north and middle forks. 

But there was another now almost forgotten big dam failure on the American River’s middle fork only 22 years earlier. Big storms washed out the Placer County Water Agency’s Hell Hole Dam, then under construction and ill-prepared for nature’s deluge. The resulting surge down the river wiped out bridges all along the river. Only the old quarry-mining “No Hands” Bridge remained standing (although with damage later patched up, ironically, with help from the area’s devoutly pro-Auburn-dam congressman John T. Doolittle [RRocklin]). 

The Highway 49 bridge crossing was not so lucky. It was wiped out. After the “Confluence” Run was opened up now nearly two decades ago, boaters have carefully picked their way past the iron and steel remains of the old bridge, left there to be buried under the deep waters of Auburn dam’s reservoir. 

Unwilling to concede that the Auburn dam would be built, Protect American River Canyons (PARC) spearheaded efforts to deal with some of the more dangerous steel rebar and to remove some 750 tons of bridge debris from the river and shoreline. Placer County has put together a neat video that is well worth a watch.

Of course, the Auburn dam fairy tale is a tale yet without an ending. I suspect that many more of us will be needed over the coming years to speak up for these 50 river miles to reach a place where we can say “and we lived happily ever after.”